Public choice interpretations of distributional preference

Harold Hochman

Constitutional Political Economy, 1996, vol. 7, issue 1, 3-20

Abstract: This essay examines, from the perspective of both economics and ethics, the logical foundations of income transfers in a democratic society that allocates resources, in the large, through free markets. Such transfers, enacted through the public choice process, modify the market-determined distribution of income, as a reflection of the distributional preferences of the members of a society. Both constitutional and post-constitutional explanations of redistributions are considered. A discussion of recent experimental evidence of distributional preferences leads into a critique of simple equality, built on Michael Walzer's distinction between monopoly and dominance, as a criterion of distributive justice. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1996

Keywords: A1; HQ; 13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
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DOI: 10.1007/BF00143476

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